Journalists and the Liberal Bias

Many Journalists Are Out of Touch With America

This article, although it uses divisive terms to group people into artificial categories, nevertheless spells out some important findings. So here it is.

NEW STUDY CHALLENGES “LIBERAL MEDIA” CLAIM

A new survey of 141 journalists indicates that the Washington press corps is more conservative than the general public on a range of economic issues from taxes to trade to health care to Social Security. The survey — conducted for FAIR by Professor David Croteau of Virginia Commonwealth University — reveals that while most national journalists identify themselves as “centrists,” their views on bread-and-butter issues are often to the right of public opinion.

In a questionnaire targeted primarily at America’s most powerful news outlets, journalists were asked policy questions modeled on ones mainstream polling firms had previously asked of the general public. Among the findings:

STATE OF THE ECONOMY: The Washington press corps is far more bullish than the public: Only 5% of the surveyed journalists said that economic conditions today in the U.S. are “fair” or “poor” — compared to 34% of the general public who chose “only fair” or “poor” in a recent nationwide poll. Most of the journalists declared household incomes at $100,000 or more, with 31% at $150,000 or more. (The median U.S. household income is roughly $36,000.)

CORPORATE POWER: Washington journalists are more conservative than the public on the question of concentrated corporate power. Asked whether “a few large corporations” have “too much power,” journalists were much more evenly divided than the public, with 57% to 43% responding affirmatively. Nationwide polls have consistently found the public to be quite one-sided on the question, with 77% (vs. 18%) responding in the affirmative in a 1995 poll.

TAXING THE WEALTHY: The general public appears to be more populist than the press corps on taxation. Asked about President Clinton’s 1993 economic plan, journalists responded fairly evenly as to whether the plan “went too far” (14%) or “not far enough” (18%) in raising taxes on the rich. This contrasts with the results of a similar 1993 poll question in which 72% of the public chose “not far enough” and only 15% chose “too far.”

TRADE TREATIES: As fervent free-traders, most of the Washington press corps are strongly at odds with the American public. Most polls reveal a public that is negative or dubious about NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. But in overwhelming numbers (65% vs. 8%), journalists assess NAFTA as having had a positive impact.

Also, the public opposes giving the President “fast-track” authority to negotiate new trade treaties almost as vehemently (67% opposed in a recent poll) as the surveyed journalists support “fast track” (71% in favor).

ECONOMIC PRIORITIES: Asked to prioritize various issues for the President and Congress, journalists and the public are often at odds. On entitlements, journalists overwhelmingly chose “reform entitlements,” by slowing growth in Medicare and Social Security, as one of the top few priorities. In contrast, most of the public chose “protect Medicare and Social Security against major cuts.” On NAFTA expansion, 24% of journalists chose expansion of NAFTA to other Latin American countries as one of the top few priorities, but only 7 % of the public did. It was actually put “toward bottom of list” by 44% of the public.

On health care, only 32 % of journalists chose “require that employers provide health insurance to employees” as one of the top few priorities, while 47% of the public did.

GUARANTEED MEDICAL CARE: The general public is more emphatic that it is Washington’s responsibility to guarantee medical care for all people without health insurance. While journalists were somewhat split on this proposition (43% pro, 35% con), the public supported it in a 1996 poll by a 2-to-1 majority (64% to 29%).

ENVIRONMENT: The only survey question in which journalists appeared to the left of the public asked respondents to choose whether stricter environmental laws “cost too many jobs and hurt the economy” or “are worth the cost.” Journalists responded 79%-21% in favor of “worth the cost”; in a 1996 poll, the public also heavily favored that option, but by a lesser majority (63% to 30%).

“I’M A CENTRIST”: When asked to characterize their political orientation on social issues as “left,” “center” or “right,” 57% of surveyed journalists chose center, 30% left and 9% right. When asked to characterize their orientation on economic issues, 64% of the journalists chose center, 19% right and 11% left.

“There appear to be very few national journalists,” concluded Croteau, “with left views on economic questions like corporate power and trade — issues that may well matter more to media owners and advertisers than social issues like gay rights and affirmative action.”

In the debate over media bias, FAIR has always argued that journalists’ private views are less important than their public performance – for example, who they rely on as sources and experts. “While this survey deflates the conservative caricature of a leftist press corps,” said FAIR executive director Jeff Cohen, “it should not be used to reinforce the notion that journalists’ views are the primary factor in news bias. The studies that best illuminate bias are FAIR’s content examinations of Nightline, PBS’s NewsHour, NPR and major dailies.”

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

a study of Earth’s economic worth, of the money we spend on the nature we use, trillions of dollars each year. We spend most to be with our own kind; land value follows population density. Besides nearness to downtowns, we also pay for proximity to good schools, lovely views, soil fertility, etc. These advantages, sellers did not create. So we pay the wrong people for land. Instead, we should pay our neighbors. They generate land’s value and deserve compensation for keeping off ours, as they’d pay us for keeping off theirs. It’s mutual compensation: we’d replace taxes with land dues – a bit like Hong Kong does – and replace subsidies with “rent” dividends to area residents – a bit like Alaska does with oil revenue. Both taxes and subsidies – however fair or not – are costly and distort the prices of the goods taxed and the services subsidized. By replacing them and letting prices become precise, we reveal the real costs of output, the real values of consumers. Then, just by following the bottom line, people can choose to conserve and prosper automatically. A community could start by shifting its property tax off buildings, onto land – a bit like a score of towns in Pennsylvania do; every place that has done it has benefited.

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

a manual. The world did not come without a way for people to prosper, and the planet to heal and stay well; that way is geonomics. Economies are part of the ecosystem. Both generate surpluses and follow self-regulating feedback loops. A cycle like the Law of Supply and Demand is one of the economy’s on/off loops. Our spending for land and resources – things that nobody made and everybody needs – constitutes our society’s surplus. Those profits without production (remember, nobody produced Earth) can become our commonwealth. To share it, we could pay land dues in to the public treasury (wouldn’t oil companies love that?) and get rent dividends back, a la Alaska’s oil dividend. Doing so let’s us axe taxes and jettison subsidies. Taxes and subsidies distort price (the DNA of exchange), violate quid pro quo by benefiting the well-connected more than anyone else, reinforce hierarchy of state over citizen, and are costly to administer (you don’t really need so much bureaucracy, do you?). Conversely, land dues motivate people to not waste sites, resources, and the ecosystem while rent dividends motivate people to not waste themselves. Receiving this income supplement – a Citizens Dividend – people can invest in their favorite technology or outgrow being “economan” and shrink their overbearing workweek in order to enjoy more time with family, friends, community, and nature. Then in all that free time, maybe we could figure out just what we are here for.

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

as unfamiliar as geo-economics. The latter is a course some universities offer that combines geography and economics. A UN newsletter, Go Between (57, Apr/May ’96; thanks, Pat Aller), cited an Asian conference on geopolitics and “geoeconomics”. The abbreviated term ‘geonomics” is the name of an institute on Middlebury College campus and of a show on CNBC. Both entities use the neologism to mean “global economics”, in particular world trade. We use geonomics entirely differently, to refer to the money people spend on the nature they use, how letting this flow collect in a few pockets creates class and poverty and assaults upon the environment, and how, on the other hand, sharing this rental flow creates equality, prosperity, and a people/planet harmony. This flow of natural rent, several trillions dollars in the US each year, shapes society and belongs to society.

the policy that the earth’s natural patterns suggests. Use the eco-system’s self-regulating feedback loops as a model. What then needs changing? Basically, the flow of money spent to own or use Earth (both sites and resources) must visit each of us. Our agent, government, exists to collect this natural rent via fees and to disburse the collected revenue via dividends. Doing this, we could forgo taxes on homes and earnings and subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. For more, see our web site, our pamphlet of the title above, or any of our other lit pieces; ask for our literature list.

suitable for framing by Green Parties. When Greens began in Germany two decades ago, they defined themselves as neither left nor right but in front. Geonomics fits that description. The Green Parties have their Four Pillars; geonomists have four ways to apply them:

Ecological Wisdom. Want people to use the eco-system wisely? Charge them Rent and, to end corporate license, add surcharges. To minimize these costs, people will use less Earth.

Nonviolence. Want people to settle disputes nonviolently? Set a good example; don’t levy taxes, which rely on the threat of incarceration, to take people’s money. Try quid pro quo fees and dues.

Social Responsibility. Want people to be responsible for their actions? Don’t make basic choices for them by subsidizing services, addicting them to a caretaker state. Let people spend shares of social surplus.

Grassroots Democracy. Better have grassroots prosperity. Remember, political power follows economic. Pay people a Citizens Dividend; to keep it, they’ll show up at the polls, public hearings, and conventions.

close to the policy of the Garden Cities in England. Founded by Ebenezer Howard over a century ago, residents own the land in common and run the town as a business. Letchworth, the oldest of the model towns, serves residents grandly from bucketfuls of collected land rent (as does the Canadian Province of Alberta from oil royalty). A geonomic town would pay the rent to residents, letting them freely choose personalized services, and also ax taxes. Both geonomics and Howard were inspired by American proto-geonomist Henry George. The movement launched by Howard today in the UK advances the shift of taxes from buildings to locations. A recent report from the Town and Country Planning Association proposes this Property Tax Shift and their journal published research in the potential of land value taxation by Tony Vickers (Vol. 69, Part 5, 2000). (Thanks to James Robertson)

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.